I think there are some neighborhoods in Chicago and some states in Mexico where the “murder is wrong” knowledge has been suspended, regardless of IQ scores.
"At least two-thirds of the world's youth do not reach basic skill levels... Skill deficits reach 94% in Sub-Saharan Africa and 89% in South Asia."
Apparently, if you say "Global Universal Basic Skills" you can get published in the JDE and NBER, but "IQ map" is eugenical pseudoscience.
How far will this penetrate the larger discourse?
In Musk-era Twitter, people like Cremieux, Noah and Steve can tweet these things out to thousands or millions, and there's not much that the SPLC can do. The libs have retreated to Bluesky where everyone who would ever mention this is blocked. Reasonable libs like Noah Smith and Yglesias appear to maintain a discreet silence.
My question is what kind of coverage will appear in the NYT and the Atlantic going forward. Is it going to be Amy Harmon-tier misinformation, or will there once again be scientifically-minded reporters like Nicholas Wade?
As a reminder, here's what happened to impeccably progressive Paige Harden when she tried to break the bubble of woke misinformation on this topic: https://archive.ph/mwn0Y
“There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial research... I feel just as strongly that we should not keep the notions that the world is 6000 years old or that climate change is a fabrication under consideration.”...Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. In the end, the board chose to disband the initiative entirely."
Thanks for the links! Looks like the Science Direct article is the 2022 (w30566) article that is not hidden behind a paywall. Not sure why Science Direct would reprint the study other than to get it circulated.
It's sort of hard to miss that broadly speaking, higher performing groups in the US tend to have higher performing homelands and the inverse is also true. Obviously in the case of India and some other places we tend to skim off the cream and get unusually intelligent immigrants compared to their national averages but overall it's a good rule of thumb. A lot of right-thinking white Americans like to point to massive outlier success stories of non-whites as what should be possible on a broad scale, a sort of thinking that they would never apply to their own race where most are quite comfortable with the idea that there are a lot of unexceptional or even downright dumb whites out there and they themselves or their kids are in fact quite special.
However, just anecdotally it does seem to me that the reality of IQ and the related performance metrics have a significant genetic component seems to be seeping into places it used to be walled off from. I was recently socializing with some white progressive friends from NYC and completely unbidden during my conversation with the husband he brought up race and IQ and the implications for social policy (we weren't even talking about domestic politics at the time). Obviously knowing my personal politics I suppose he thought he could vocalize a few thoughts/ideas that are probably totally verboten in his circle back home. Now, he did cling to the idea that perhaps there are some social interventions like early childhood education that could meaningfully move the needle on outcomes, but he did accept that they would not eliminate inherent cognitive disparities and that from a moral perspective the left needs to drop its obsession with equity because it's an impossible goal.
This doesn't mean the progressive left will drop its love of DEI, but it does probably mean the overall attachment and willingness to fight for it is weaker.
Early waves of Indian immigrants were high IQ skimmed. Recent ones less so. I mean, we are certainly not getting the average Indian, not by a long shot. But the recent waves of software developers are not super at software development. The reason they are the highest earning group in America (according to one comedian. I didn't fact check this. If you can't trust a comedian's father, whom can you trust) is their cultural talent for climbing existing hierarchies. The average American developer wants nothing but to be left in a quiet room to code. Most Indian developers want to jump to management as soon as possible and they are good at doing so.
Your friend's husband is an interesting case. I think materialism won decisively over the more spiritual 'blank slate' philosophy of the mind. If you think everyone is a blank slate at birth it makes sense to tout the Head Start program at cocktail parties. Once you accept that the mind is just the effect of the matter in the brain doing physics stuff and that most human behaviors evolved for survival reasons, it's a pretty mild yet slippery slope to IQ determinism.
Yes, it was interesting to see him struggle with his knowledge about the implications of cognitive ability being heritable and desire to try to "do something" via social policies while intellectually understanding they mostly won't move the needle at all. I would say he's somewhere between the "bargaining" and "depression" stages of grief.
My response was essentially that society needs to accept that we are not going to have proportional racial representation in cognitively demanding jobs, we should value and respect anyone who is doing the best work they are capable of, and those holding up their end of the social bargain but in lower-paid jobs deserve some additional support from the public.
Obviously even if we did get to my preferred understanding, it still means that there are going to be pretty significant gaps in median household income and wealth by race. That's not a problem that can really be resolved to anyone's satisfaction and an unpleasant but permanent feature of any multi-ethnic society. Political warfare around this has been highly effective for the left and they aren't going to abandon that tactic either, even if its effectiveness declines over time. It also makes various European nations' experiment with foreign immigration such an incredibly massive own goal - not only did they lower their level of social trust and safety, they created a new political constituency that will forever be mobilized on ethnic lines against the historic peoples.
One gets the impression that the IQ mix/proportions of a country have a large effect on the culture and economy of that country. Oddly, the very people who would tell you at a cocktail party that no culture or way of life is superior to any other, implicitly assume that the cultures and economies of the US, Western Europe, Japan et all are superior and that people from other places have a right to them.
Well written. Trash collectors, although trash collecting is not a mentally taxing job, should be valued. Trash collectors do the dirty work of society.
With more and more white women bearing the children of black men over the past forty years, I wonder whether the IQ levels of blacks might rise a little. Witness football quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who is genetically more white than black but is considered black by most Americans. His wife is white so Mahomes' children will be about 75 % white.
Although IQ would seem to be a result of genetics, environment and health seems to have something to do with IQ. Further, I wonder if certain religions diminish IQ. It would seem to me that Islam, which considers most facts settled and indisputable thus limiting the search for truth, tends to limit IQ. If the Koran tells you what is true, why even have scientific inquiry?
Note as well that Cremieux weighs in early today (2:59am EST Jan 16, 2025) with an exhaustive defense and comparative analysis of Lynn's work over the decades. Nice to see Scott Alexander kicking off the opportunity for the (few) remaining biggies in IQ to show their stuff.
I remember being shocked and then indignant upon first reading Lynn’s estimates of Irish IQ. Over the years I’ve come to suspect that he might not be far from the mark.
There has been a very large brain drain from Ireland for going on two centuries now. Both my parents emigrated from there, in fact.
There is also the fact that many people start drinking as soon as they can see over the pub counter; age fourteen wouldn’t be uncommon. That has really only been the case for forty years or so, since the collapse of Church authority got underway.
I’ve spent a good deal of time in rural Ireland, and though there are exceptions of course, I’ve not been highly impressed by what I’ve seen.
I believe the non-native born portion of the Irish population is now as high as 18%, with large portions of that from Africa and Brazil. I don’t think that bodes well for Ireland’s future, I’m very sorry to say.
Most northern Europeans have problems with alcohol that Mediterranean Europeans don't have. Mediterranean Europeans have been conditioned to alcohol more thoroughly and for a longer time period.
I read a review of a book about how culture is a far more important evolutionary innovation than intelligence. Smart colonizers coming from Europe to the Americas cannot use their extra IQ to figure out the peculiarities of farming and hunting in the new land. The better strategy is to befriend the natives and learn what their culture evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years of surviving.
This is true in most places for most of history. As the reviewer pointed out, heretical ideas are violently rejected because, like mutations(my analogy that one), most of them will get your society killed.
My guess is that in these societies, being a bit smarter helps you rise to leadership roles, but it isn't sufficient.
As Steve points out, it's recently, maybe starting in the 1800s, that higher intelligence became a much more valuable trait.
Pocahontas' English husband figured out how to grow tropical tobacco successfully in Virginia. He didn't learn that from the Powhatan or the West Indians. The rest is American history.
You can't eat tobacco. This article makes it clear that the colonists were starving in the years leading up to his feat, even with supply ships coming. In the absence of supply from the homeland they would have all been dead by the time he introduced the tobacco. Also, it doesn't read as if he figured out how to grow it. Rather he acquired some better seeds from Trinidad and brought them to Virginia where tobacco was already grown.
The first year they only grew four barrels of the stuff. So I'm sticking with the above point.
Ireland got mass education quite late in the 20th C and then scaled it up very quickly. So an Irish person born in 1925 might have left school at 12 but their kids might have all gone to college.
So some of the weak 20th C results was just down to poor education in a generation that has now died off.
Genotypic Irish IQ is probably at north-west European norms and phenotype has caught up.
My dad was born in Ireland in 1937. He finished his formal schooling at 14, as did four of his five siblings. There was only money to send the eldest on for more education. Five of the six kids in his family emigrated, including the college-educated one.
My dad was highly intelligent. He was drafted here in the US and the Army offered him OCS or flight school based on his test scores.
Ireland’s brain drain for most of the twentieth century was severe. It almost had to have an effect.
I asked Perplexity about Lynn, and then posed a follow-up re usage. Here's the response:
"Good catch! In my previous response, I used the British spelling "rigour" instead of the American spelling "rigor". This was likely an unintentional artifact of my language processing, as I aim to use standard American English by default.
The correct American English spelling is indeed "rigor", which would have been the more appropriate choice in the context of a response likely intended for an American audience. The British spelling "rigour" is standard in UK English, while "rigor" is preferred in US English.
In academic and scientific writing in the United States, "rigor" is the standard spelling. So the sentence should read:
"Lynn's work was criticized for lacking scientific rigor..."
Thank you for bringing this to my attention, as precision in language is important."
"A couple of generations ago, the Chicago Tribune editorialized in favor of building the Cabrini-Green public housing project on the grounds that it would stop poor kids from eating lead paint flakes.
It was built and quickly became notorious and now is demolishd."
Eh, that just shows that 'The Man' will do almost anything to keep the Black man down.
"Interestingly, raw IQ scores have been rising around the world for as far back as testing has been performed on a national basis. To deal with this, test developers periodically raise the number of correct questions a test taker must answer correctly to achieve an average score of 100."
That observation is related to another matter: the use of "IQ" as "mental capability". A more objective measure of mental capability is required if we are to make decisions about changes in level of mental capability over time.
As the article also observes, we encounter people with low IQ's who seem adequate in normal work although inadequate in more mentally-demanding work. So for estimating the competence of an individual or group for practical accomplishments in the mundane run of affairs, IQ statistics seem misleading.
Therefore, I propose the following. For that rule that a society needs a certain percentage of its population with IQ's over 106, a better rule would specify a criterion like, say, 100% skill in literacy at the tenth grade level and 100% skill in math at the 8th grade level. (Not skill to get a passing grade; perfect skill.)
Also, an objective indication of feralness would be handy. Why have certain housing projects failed? A contributing factor seems to be the proportion of feral people. People with chronic feral issues are defensive, stubborn, high-strung, selfish, morally about 8-12 years old. Everyone acts like a wild animal sometime or other, and feral people I've known are not necessarily violent, but they are relatively unpleasant company and tend to get fired or not promoted more than healthier folks. Yes, intellectual capacity is probably negatively correlated with feralness.
„My impression is that whites in America don't pay much attention to subtle differences in apparent racial ancestry between blacks: e.g., I've seen lots of movies starring Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, or Morgan Freeman, but I couldn't tell you who is fairest and who is darkest. I just have them all mentally categorized as African-American.“.
Would you make the observation about female leads?
Interesting stuff, however still verboten.
I think there are some neighborhoods in Chicago and some states in Mexico where the “murder is wrong” knowledge has been suspended, regardless of IQ scores.
Noah Carl at Aporia links to this study of "Global Universal Basic Skills" (PISA, TIMSS...) which of course basically confirms Richard Lynn's map.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w30566
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030438782300161X
"At least two-thirds of the world's youth do not reach basic skill levels... Skill deficits reach 94% in Sub-Saharan Africa and 89% in South Asia."
Apparently, if you say "Global Universal Basic Skills" you can get published in the JDE and NBER, but "IQ map" is eugenical pseudoscience.
How far will this penetrate the larger discourse?
In Musk-era Twitter, people like Cremieux, Noah and Steve can tweet these things out to thousands or millions, and there's not much that the SPLC can do. The libs have retreated to Bluesky where everyone who would ever mention this is blocked. Reasonable libs like Noah Smith and Yglesias appear to maintain a discreet silence.
My question is what kind of coverage will appear in the NYT and the Atlantic going forward. Is it going to be Amy Harmon-tier misinformation, or will there once again be scientifically-minded reporters like Nicholas Wade?
As a reminder, here's what happened to impeccably progressive Paige Harden when she tried to break the bubble of woke misinformation on this topic: https://archive.ph/mwn0Y
“There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial research... I feel just as strongly that we should not keep the notions that the world is 6000 years old or that climate change is a fabrication under consideration.”...Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. In the end, the board chose to disband the initiative entirely."
Thanks for the links! Looks like the Science Direct article is the 2022 (w30566) article that is not hidden behind a paywall. Not sure why Science Direct would reprint the study other than to get it circulated.
It's sort of hard to miss that broadly speaking, higher performing groups in the US tend to have higher performing homelands and the inverse is also true. Obviously in the case of India and some other places we tend to skim off the cream and get unusually intelligent immigrants compared to their national averages but overall it's a good rule of thumb. A lot of right-thinking white Americans like to point to massive outlier success stories of non-whites as what should be possible on a broad scale, a sort of thinking that they would never apply to their own race where most are quite comfortable with the idea that there are a lot of unexceptional or even downright dumb whites out there and they themselves or their kids are in fact quite special.
However, just anecdotally it does seem to me that the reality of IQ and the related performance metrics have a significant genetic component seems to be seeping into places it used to be walled off from. I was recently socializing with some white progressive friends from NYC and completely unbidden during my conversation with the husband he brought up race and IQ and the implications for social policy (we weren't even talking about domestic politics at the time). Obviously knowing my personal politics I suppose he thought he could vocalize a few thoughts/ideas that are probably totally verboten in his circle back home. Now, he did cling to the idea that perhaps there are some social interventions like early childhood education that could meaningfully move the needle on outcomes, but he did accept that they would not eliminate inherent cognitive disparities and that from a moral perspective the left needs to drop its obsession with equity because it's an impossible goal.
This doesn't mean the progressive left will drop its love of DEI, but it does probably mean the overall attachment and willingness to fight for it is weaker.
Early waves of Indian immigrants were high IQ skimmed. Recent ones less so. I mean, we are certainly not getting the average Indian, not by a long shot. But the recent waves of software developers are not super at software development. The reason they are the highest earning group in America (according to one comedian. I didn't fact check this. If you can't trust a comedian's father, whom can you trust) is their cultural talent for climbing existing hierarchies. The average American developer wants nothing but to be left in a quiet room to code. Most Indian developers want to jump to management as soon as possible and they are good at doing so.
Your friend's husband is an interesting case. I think materialism won decisively over the more spiritual 'blank slate' philosophy of the mind. If you think everyone is a blank slate at birth it makes sense to tout the Head Start program at cocktail parties. Once you accept that the mind is just the effect of the matter in the brain doing physics stuff and that most human behaviors evolved for survival reasons, it's a pretty mild yet slippery slope to IQ determinism.
Yes, it was interesting to see him struggle with his knowledge about the implications of cognitive ability being heritable and desire to try to "do something" via social policies while intellectually understanding they mostly won't move the needle at all. I would say he's somewhere between the "bargaining" and "depression" stages of grief.
My response was essentially that society needs to accept that we are not going to have proportional racial representation in cognitively demanding jobs, we should value and respect anyone who is doing the best work they are capable of, and those holding up their end of the social bargain but in lower-paid jobs deserve some additional support from the public.
Obviously even if we did get to my preferred understanding, it still means that there are going to be pretty significant gaps in median household income and wealth by race. That's not a problem that can really be resolved to anyone's satisfaction and an unpleasant but permanent feature of any multi-ethnic society. Political warfare around this has been highly effective for the left and they aren't going to abandon that tactic either, even if its effectiveness declines over time. It also makes various European nations' experiment with foreign immigration such an incredibly massive own goal - not only did they lower their level of social trust and safety, they created a new political constituency that will forever be mobilized on ethnic lines against the historic peoples.
One gets the impression that the IQ mix/proportions of a country have a large effect on the culture and economy of that country. Oddly, the very people who would tell you at a cocktail party that no culture or way of life is superior to any other, implicitly assume that the cultures and economies of the US, Western Europe, Japan et all are superior and that people from other places have a right to them.
I agree with your second paragraph .
Well written. Trash collectors, although trash collecting is not a mentally taxing job, should be valued. Trash collectors do the dirty work of society.
With more and more white women bearing the children of black men over the past forty years, I wonder whether the IQ levels of blacks might rise a little. Witness football quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who is genetically more white than black but is considered black by most Americans. His wife is white so Mahomes' children will be about 75 % white.
Although IQ would seem to be a result of genetics, environment and health seems to have something to do with IQ. Further, I wonder if certain religions diminish IQ. It would seem to me that Islam, which considers most facts settled and indisputable thus limiting the search for truth, tends to limit IQ. If the Koran tells you what is true, why even have scientific inquiry?
Islam sure seems to make people stupid.
"an extremely high-IQ person, such as a Supreme Court justice,"
That didn't age well.
Note as well that Cremieux weighs in early today (2:59am EST Jan 16, 2025) with an exhaustive defense and comparative analysis of Lynn's work over the decades. Nice to see Scott Alexander kicking off the opportunity for the (few) remaining biggies in IQ to show their stuff.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cremieux/p/national-iqs-are-valid
"There weren't all that many Americans ... who were more than 50% African but less than say 90+% white."
Even fewer will be over 90% white.
I remember being shocked and then indignant upon first reading Lynn’s estimates of Irish IQ. Over the years I’ve come to suspect that he might not be far from the mark.
There has been a very large brain drain from Ireland for going on two centuries now. Both my parents emigrated from there, in fact.
There is also the fact that many people start drinking as soon as they can see over the pub counter; age fourteen wouldn’t be uncommon. That has really only been the case for forty years or so, since the collapse of Church authority got underway.
I’ve spent a good deal of time in rural Ireland, and though there are exceptions of course, I’ve not been highly impressed by what I’ve seen.
I believe the non-native born portion of the Irish population is now as high as 18%, with large portions of that from Africa and Brazil. I don’t think that bodes well for Ireland’s future, I’m very sorry to say.
Ireland does fine lately on the PISA, so I dunno ...
Yes, my experience there is deep, but not very broad. I’ve spent almost no time at all in the urban areas. I sure hope I’m wrong.
Yes, the Celts have a lot of alcoholism. You see it in Scots too.
Most northern Europeans have problems with alcohol that Mediterranean Europeans don't have. Mediterranean Europeans have been conditioned to alcohol more thoroughly and for a longer time period.
I read a review of a book about how culture is a far more important evolutionary innovation than intelligence. Smart colonizers coming from Europe to the Americas cannot use their extra IQ to figure out the peculiarities of farming and hunting in the new land. The better strategy is to befriend the natives and learn what their culture evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years of surviving.
This is true in most places for most of history. As the reviewer pointed out, heretical ideas are violently rejected because, like mutations(my analogy that one), most of them will get your society killed.
My guess is that in these societies, being a bit smarter helps you rise to leadership roles, but it isn't sufficient.
As Steve points out, it's recently, maybe starting in the 1800s, that higher intelligence became a much more valuable trait.
Pocahontas' English husband figured out how to grow tropical tobacco successfully in Virginia. He didn't learn that from the Powhatan or the West Indians. The rest is American history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rolfe
You can't eat tobacco. This article makes it clear that the colonists were starving in the years leading up to his feat, even with supply ships coming. In the absence of supply from the homeland they would have all been dead by the time he introduced the tobacco. Also, it doesn't read as if he figured out how to grow it. Rather he acquired some better seeds from Trinidad and brought them to Virginia where tobacco was already grown.
The first year they only grew four barrels of the stuff. So I'm sticking with the above point.
Ireland got mass education quite late in the 20th C and then scaled it up very quickly. So an Irish person born in 1925 might have left school at 12 but their kids might have all gone to college.
So some of the weak 20th C results was just down to poor education in a generation that has now died off.
Genotypic Irish IQ is probably at north-west European norms and phenotype has caught up.
My dad was born in Ireland in 1937. He finished his formal schooling at 14, as did four of his five siblings. There was only money to send the eldest on for more education. Five of the six kids in his family emigrated, including the college-educated one.
My dad was highly intelligent. He was drafted here in the US and the Army offered him OCS or flight school based on his test scores.
Ireland’s brain drain for most of the twentieth century was severe. It almost had to have an effect.
I asked Perplexity about Lynn, and then posed a follow-up re usage. Here's the response:
"Good catch! In my previous response, I used the British spelling "rigour" instead of the American spelling "rigor". This was likely an unintentional artifact of my language processing, as I aim to use standard American English by default.
The correct American English spelling is indeed "rigor", which would have been the more appropriate choice in the context of a response likely intended for an American audience. The British spelling "rigour" is standard in UK English, while "rigor" is preferred in US English.
In academic and scientific writing in the United States, "rigor" is the standard spelling. So the sentence should read:
"Lynn's work was criticized for lacking scientific rigor..."
Thank you for bringing this to my attention, as precision in language is important."
"A couple of generations ago, the Chicago Tribune editorialized in favor of building the Cabrini-Green public housing project on the grounds that it would stop poor kids from eating lead paint flakes.
It was built and quickly became notorious and now is demolishd."
Eh, that just shows that 'The Man' will do almost anything to keep the Black man down.
"Interestingly, raw IQ scores have been rising around the world for as far back as testing has been performed on a national basis. To deal with this, test developers periodically raise the number of correct questions a test taker must answer correctly to achieve an average score of 100."
That observation is related to another matter: the use of "IQ" as "mental capability". A more objective measure of mental capability is required if we are to make decisions about changes in level of mental capability over time.
As the article also observes, we encounter people with low IQ's who seem adequate in normal work although inadequate in more mentally-demanding work. So for estimating the competence of an individual or group for practical accomplishments in the mundane run of affairs, IQ statistics seem misleading.
Therefore, I propose the following. For that rule that a society needs a certain percentage of its population with IQ's over 106, a better rule would specify a criterion like, say, 100% skill in literacy at the tenth grade level and 100% skill in math at the 8th grade level. (Not skill to get a passing grade; perfect skill.)
Also, an objective indication of feralness would be handy. Why have certain housing projects failed? A contributing factor seems to be the proportion of feral people. People with chronic feral issues are defensive, stubborn, high-strung, selfish, morally about 8-12 years old. Everyone acts like a wild animal sometime or other, and feral people I've known are not necessarily violent, but they are relatively unpleasant company and tend to get fired or not promoted more than healthier folks. Yes, intellectual capacity is probably negatively correlated with feralness.
Anyway, that's my current opinion.
„My impression is that whites in America don't pay much attention to subtle differences in apparent racial ancestry between blacks: e.g., I've seen lots of movies starring Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, or Morgan Freeman, but I couldn't tell you who is fairest and who is darkest. I just have them all mentally categorized as African-American.“.
Would you make the observation about female leads?